14 January 2015

Talking turkey

Much of the honest scheming is surely going on in smoke free back rooms, war-gaming possible scenarios, running the counterfactuals. Would any minority administration long survive? What if the Nationalists won enough seats to put Labour over the top, would England wear it, and would Miliband cut the deal? If the balance of power lay with Nigel Farage, would he go into coalition with Cameron's mob, and would the punters accept it?

Could the depleted rump of the Liberal Democrats be persuaded to prop up the Labour Party with a confidence and supply deal, a renewed Lib-Lab pact for the 21st century? These kinds of questions seem to be dominating the fizz of anticipation on the airwaves. But much of the public commentary about the Scottish dimension seems to me to miss the mark and to be neglecting obvious tensions and challenges thrown up by the 2015 general election.

The Nationalist pitch in 2015 seems to fall into two or three key arguments. One. Dump the calculations and the tactics. Vote with your heart. Give Labour a kicking. Punish their hubris. You know it'll be fun. "Red Tories." "They're all the same." Better Together. Etcetera.

This sits - somewhat uncomfortably - alongside proposition two: Labour can't be trusted to govern alone. With Ed sitting unsteady at the helm, they look like losers, despite the much more equivocal polling picture. Vote SNP to despatch a powerful phalanx of Nationalists to torment the Labour Party into virtue, on spending cuts, military hardware and enhanced devolution. It is equally important for the party to be coy about how precisely this might actually work. If the Nationalists ruled out a coalition, the case for including them in the fraught saga that is the leadership debates would be very materially weakened.

This makes sense if we are anticipating a minority Labour "win", but in any other scenario, it is essentially a pitch for "our" feeble fifty to replace Labour's. A key plank of the argument for independence was that Scotland frequently doesn't get the government that the majority supported. We can despatch dozens of anti Tory parliamentarians to London: it makes no difference if the majority in the rest of the country votes true blue.

If the stars do not align, and an agreeable minority does not materialise, however, our fifty risk being doomed to being feeble too. "A strong voice for Scotland" in Westminster, but one at risk of crying in the wilderness. The opposition given the government by the Nationalists may be more gratifyingly robust than the current Labour regime offers -- but it remains opposition, with very limited powers of action. Ask Jim Murphy. All he can do is mew and call for this and that issue to be considered and prioritised. With a strike of her pen, Nicola can make things like this happen.

It is cold, thankless, frequently fruitless work outside those government offices. Redundancy is one thing, one political cul de sac, but worse, what if it works? What if the Nationalists are somehow able to throw their weight around at Westminster, frustrating Whitehall plans, and elbowing the centre of British politics leftward, playing the table cannily. Where then for the argument that only independence can secure for Scotland the politics that the majority seems to desire? Oops.

But when you get into it, into the detail, how is any SNP deal going to work, and what does it risk? And to whom would it be acceptable? There's quite a bit of sloppy, flip thinking doing the rounds at the moment about the implications of this for the Nationalists. A coalition of any sort seems decidedly difficult to envision, given the party rhetoric, local enemies, traditions, and party support.

The SNP must have seen enough junior coalition parters being cannibalised to learn caution. They must also know that the discreet, deniable informal arrangement between 2007 and 2011 when the Tories helped pass the minority government's budget cannot extend to any Westminster deal they are involved it. It will all be done in the glare of publicity, and in the context of a Scottish political discourse shot through with hard antipathies. Nobody wants to be 2015's Nick Clegg.

But if a full coalition, and voting in support of English legislation is too rich for your blood, you may be inclined to say, "ach well, we'll go for confidence and supply instead" - as if that represented a wafer-thin undertaking for any party to give to a governing minority. Applying yourself for a minute or two to the implications of this should reveal, however, that any deal of this kind has the same capacity for toxicity as full coalition. Sure, you may not be contributing ministers to be monstered in the press, but it means voting for the Labour budget.

Imagine you are a new-minted Nationalist MP, sent to Westminster with your blood roiling, determined to challenge the state-shrinking, welfare-cutting orthodoxy which dominates the present coalition and Labour party thinking. Would you - could you - vote for that? Cast your mind back to your constituency, and the heated rhetoric of the campaign. Do you think your confidence and supply vote would survive its rigour? Would you satisfy your own critique of Liberal - and Labour - sell outs, turncoats and right-wing bastardy? Good luck with that one.

Governments do plenty of controversial things, but supporting a budget is more than a technical matter signing off the national accounts: it is to be implicated in basic economic and social decision-making of the governing regime. Unless a minority Labour Party could be persuaded radically to depart from Ed Balls' current spending plans, any coalition or confidence and supply deal between Labour and the SNP is fraught with peril.

Even if the Labour party hand us the scalpel, we're under no obligation to draw it across our throats. Ad hoc unpredictability, issue by issue, may offer a safer haven. But eventually, it comes down to this: would you vote to sustain or to evict a government from office? If you are the sitting Prime Minister whose fate is being decided, this is a hair-raising situation to find yourself in. But the predicament engulfs all of the opposition too, particularly in a tight parliament.

There is an important lesson here. Although I remain skeptical about he likelihood of the SNP achieving anything like the kind of breakthrough in Westminster current polling suggests is possible, being sent in triumph to a hung parliament with unpredictable bottom line numbers represents a great opportunity - and a real threat - to the party, if events are not handled with cold-eyed self-awareness, and the right calculations made. A good, but more modest result - twelve seats say - may deliver us from peril. But history is frequently cruel. And even victors are by victories undone.

30 comments
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If the SNP were to win as few as 12 seats, it would be taken as evidence that they were no longer a serious threat to the status quo. We could then forget about not just independence but also any additional powers for the Scottish Parliament.

The more seats the SNP win, the more leverage they will have. Perhaps they will extract concessions from Labour, or perhaps the unionists will be pressured into a mistake which will lead sooner or later to the end of the union. Yes, there are risks, but they must be taken or Scotland will end up as a mere region of an appallingly neo-liberal, perhaps bankrupt, UK.

As a pedantic aside, is the term 'confidence and supply' not obsolete as a result of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, as the government would only be forced to resign if it were to lose a specific 'no confidence' vote?

We'll see how long the Fixed Term Parliaments Act survives. It hangs on a politically shoogly peg (not least because they granted themselves an excessive fixed term, five years to Holyrood's four. In terms of SNP performance, twelve seats would be the party's best ever performance. My caution derives, in part, from past results. In 2010, for example, the party did poorly in places where we actually win in Holyrood. In my childhood stamping ground of Argyll and Bute, for example, there has been an SNP MSP since 2007, but in 2010, we came fourth in the seat. Other constituencies tell similar stories. I'm not ruling out a radical change - the referendum has shaken many things up - but it is important to have some sense of the magnitude of the electoral shift folk are enthusiastically expecting. There is a risk - probably an unavoidable risk, given the polls - of making the best the enemy of the good here.

My main point about having 40+ SNP MPs is that surely they would be better servants to their constituents. This is a point vastly overlooked. I would rather have Natalie McGarry as my MP than Margaret Curran. I would rather have Patrick Grady in place of Anne McKechin, Alison Thewliss in place of Anas Sarwar etc. And I'm sure you're no different.

I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make with the post, particularly about "replacing" the "feeble fifty." Surely the reason they're feeble is because they routinely and regularly either fail to fight for Scottish interests, or actively fight against them? 50 SNP MPs are 50 MPs who are not going to vote for Tory austerity measures, or for a welfare cap, or for any number of other damaging things which New Labour MPs either voted for or abstained on.

It's clear now that New Labour are no longer the opposition in Westminster, they merely take the facade of an opposition. They support austerity, they support nuclear deterrents, they support far more Tory policies and ideals than they oppose in comparison to the SNP, Greens and others. Either way would be crying into the wilderness: I'd prefer our representatives had much louder cries.

"What if the Nationalists are somehow able to throw their weight around at Westminster, frustrating Whitehall plans, and elbowing the centre of British politics leftward, playing the table cannily. Where then for the argument that only independence can secure for Scotland the politics that the majority seems to desire?"

Then they'll have to "settle" for making Scotland a better place, and giving Scots the confidence and proof they need to show that self-government is not just possible, but infinitely preferable to remaining in the UK. I've seen a similar argument given for Home Rule and Devomax, which makes me wonder: if Home Rule/Devomax could stop the SNP by eliminating the desire for Independence, then WHY HAVEN'T THEY DONE IT? Only explanation: Home Rule/Devomax will not end the desire for independence, but in fact enhance the case for it.

Two distinct senses of "feeble" here, I think. In its 1980s sense, the feeble fifty's feebleness was less down to their collusion with Mrs Thatcher - though the behaviour of some Labour MPs on the poll tax dissent is a dishonourable counterpoint - but the fact that even if they opposed the majority Tory government stoutly, it had limited impact. It is this fate, rather than the latter, I was referring to here. If you can't have an impact on decision-making, after all, at least you can kick up a decent stooshie about it. A lesson dealt by a juvenile Alex Salmond, when he took to his pins and heckled during one of Lawson's budgets.

I don't know where all this bizarre talk of a 2007-11 "informal alliance" between the SNP and Tories has come from all of a sudden in the last couple of weeks. The Tories blocked or at least voted against huge amounts of major SNP legislation in those years - a referendum, free prescriptions, minimum pricing, abolishing the graduate endowment and of course there were the trams.

They voted for budgets because (a) they won some concessions, as any sensible party - ie not Labour - opposing a minority government would be able to do, and (b) they knew that the electorate wouldn't take kindly to having the government brought down by petty and reckless intransigence, which is what would happen if it couldn't pass its budget, and they'd get punished at the ballot box.

Of course, I'm not in the SNP so maybe there really WAS one and it's only now that it's come out into the open. But frankly, if there was then whoever negotiated it needs their arse kicking.

As divorce lawyers gleefully assert, deniability is built into informal arrangement, but there is surely little doubt that some kind of arrangement was in place between the SNP and Tories. In September, Auntie Annabel gave Errant Eck a good smack for denying the affair -

'Goldie, who forged a close working relationship with Salmond as Scottish Tory leader between 2007 and 2011, said the first minister was guilty of double standards for repeatedly attacking Labour's coalition with the Tories in the anti-independence campaign.

Goldie said: "When his political fate depended on us, he didn't think twice before seeking and taking our support. It is quite extraordinary that he's now doing a complete volte-face and now proclaims that the Tories are the worst things on the earth.'

As Severin observes

'The SNP is also in coalition with the Tories in at least one Scottish council, South Ayrshire, and has been in multi-party coalitions with the Conservatives and other parties several times since taking power in 2007'

There are in fact several unlikely coalitions at council level which seem to be muddling through which is surely a good sign for the body politic. We can't always be throwing eggs at each other.

Seeking support for budgets is a world away from an informal alliance. The very nature of minority government means seeking support from other parties - the annual horse-trading leading up to the budget vote was one of the things that used to get the political bubble excited between 2007 and 2011.

This rewriting of history to turn regular horse-trading into an informal alliance is transparent pish.

My only point was this, really. However you wish to characterise the negotiations, the fact that the SNP government's budgets were being passed with Tory support between 2007 and 2011 never achieved much political salience. I suspect few of the punters really had much idea that this was happening, and there was no political hit for the Nationalists in being seen to cooperate with the Conservatives. We cannot expect any SNP cooperation with Westminster budgets to be treated in the same light.

It's a completely different context surely?. Scottish Tories like Annabel and Ruth are a different league from Cameron and Osborne. They are not the power elite. Plus, they are further diminished by the fact that they are in a minority at Holrood and owe the fact that they have a seat at all to the Scottish parliament's proportional voting whereas at Westminster English Tories would outnumber our 59 MPs by at least 5 to 1. In short, they're tamed and in their place.

I think we take too much of a top down approach. We potentially face a similar situation to that faced by Parnell in the 1890s. Without extra-parliamentary pressure and activity (in his case Fenian and Land League agitation) our politicians will achieve little. But with potent grass roots activity and agitation for more powers Britain faces being an international pariah if it fails to meet that demand. Politicians can only achieve so much.

I agree with Taranaich, I'm not sure I get the point regarding replacing their feeble fifty with one of our own, because it kind of leads you to the inevitable conclusion that if there's no point in the SNP having lots of MPs - and there's certainly no point having hardly any - then what's the point in even standing?

I think you're maybe underplaying a pretty major weapon for the SNP here. Labour can only govern in England if it has a supply of Scottish MPs to back its proposals. If the Feeble Fifty is replaced with a chunk of SNP MPs who don't vote on English matters, that reduces a Labour government's ability to pass legislation in England that is opposed by the Tories. Unless, of course, those SNP MPs can be convinced to "interfere" in English matters (for a price, of course). That may indeed seem to counteract the argument that only independence can deliver the politics the majority in Scotland desire, but is turning the Westminster elections into a permanency of SNP whitewashes really the solution people crave?

And then there's the nuclear option - neither Labour or Tories having enough to govern on their own, nor even form two-party coalitions, so thinking "well, it works in Germany..." and creating a grand coalition. That would be lethal for Labour in Scotland, especially if it's done before the 2016 election. But given the choice between forming a minority government with confidence and supply from anti-Trident parties, or biting the bullet to form a Trident-saving coalition with the Tories, I suspect London Labour would go for option b.

Both scenarios, in my eyes, could only accelerate the journey to independence. Both give us the opportunity to break the union, either from within, or by forcing the hand of others. The alternative - making do with a smattering of SNP MPs while leaving Labour to prop themselves up with a gang of obedient Scottish MPs - couldn't possibly be better.

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree that we need to be careful of expecting too much, but the lower you aim, the less you achieve.

Man, your piece is filled with - this could go badly, that could go wrong, if it's not played right that other thing will happen. Yes we need to be careful but your post suggests it is such an uncertain and dangerous proposition for the SNP it's not even worth trying.

That wasn't quite what I was aiming for, and certainly isn't what I think. The overwhelming weight of commentary in Scottish politics at the moment makes no mention whatever about the risks I attempted to touch on here. They are, will or nil it, real -- and we gain perspective, rather than losing resolve, but having them in mind. At least, that's my philosophy.

The long and the short of it is that we can do nothing else, chips falling where they may. Playing the hand will be tricky, and if you wanted someone to play it Eck is probably that person.

The odds of the following general election being 5 years hence must be rather long though. It ought to prove that no matter who we vote for we get what England wants, broadly speaking. Playing the hand so as to please a domestic audience long term will be the tightrope walk.

Aye,the perpetually sad affair of the Front Line and the Back Room. Invisible strings being what they are. Maybe the wee man was better brandishing a brace of Machiavellian biros,their repution supposedly being mightier than the scimitar.

You have to admire the tactics. We'll set ourselves up as a new or renewed Left - an alternative to Labour - and then we'll fight an election in which we can only win, at best, 59 of the 600+ seats.

It's a UK general election - a Goliathan democracy bursting into song and 45 million people voting to decide their destiny - and the SNP, by virtue of prizing nationalism over democracy, have basically opted out. It all, I'm afraid, comes back to Labour in the end.

There was virtually no mention in the article of SNP's ability, if they wield a strong phalanx of MPs, to extract v significant enhanced devo powers from Labour. That's th main point isn't it? It creates its own momentum as we know. It's the long game. Get real concessions and it is worth holding your nose and, having tried to mitigate, voting along with budgets you don't like or other unpleasantries. They are not for ever. Every enhanced power though, is in practice forever and will lead to eventual independence.

I am more concerned about the Trident issue (and generally the self-preservation of a terminally corrupt paedophile-protective WM establishment) leading to a grand ConLab coalition. And yet even here I wonder if Nicola & Eck have not been doing some in-depth research into Labour. The anti-Trident cause is so overwhelmingly logical it has a groundswell of English support including from more than a few Labour MPs also. Not all Labour is Blairite and wants to starve social services in order to fund nuclear warheads when we lack troops and airplanes. Brought out by SNP and slammed on the negotiating table, I think the Trident issue might well provoke a serious split in Labour party ranks. It is good card. Not to mention morally correct.

It is a fair point: I do gloss over that issue here, and it too is definitely part of the 2015 "pitch". Trident is an interesting too. I was asking a Labour pal the other day if they thought there might be a quiet majority (or at least a significant minority) in Labour's parliamentary delegation which might welcome the pretext to ditch Trident renewal which an SNP bloc might give them? Mibbies aye.

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